John Kennedy was unable to recover fully from the knee injury sustained on his international debut in 2004. Photograph: Epsilon/Getty Images

Perhaps it was inevitable, but the confirmation a week ago that Celtic's John Kennedy had been forced to retire from professional football still struck an emotional chord with even the most hardened Scottish football fan.

Kennedy's knee has never recovered from the brutal challenge of Romania's Ioan Ganea at Hampden Park in 2004, a matter of minutes into the defender's international debut. As Martin O'Neill once stated, correctly, Kennedy's character is such that he will be a success no matter what he chooses to do with his life. Scotland, meanwhile, are left to rue the loss of one of the few talents of the last decade who looked as if he could become top class. The luck of the Scots, for now, is not worth having.

Saturday in Cardiff marked the latest harrowing episode for the Tartan Army. George Burley, inevitably after the Wales debacle, is no more. The Scottish Football Association will take its time in finding the national manager's replacement but must seek not only a back to basics on-field approach, but a coach who will want and be allowed a hands-on role from youth level upwards.

Burley's ideology was ultimately flawed. His high-intensity, attacking approach was a revelation at Hearts in 2005 but not suited to Scotland's international side. It seems difficult for some people to accept yet the facts are plain – Scottish players are simply not good enough to approach international matches with gay abandon.

James McFadden, a decent player occasionally capable of the extraordinary, is wrongly hailed as some form of talismanic figure in a team blessed only with, on a relative scale, workmanlike players. Nobody has yet solved the conundrum of how or where best to utilise McFadden; Burley seemed to want to mould an attacking team around him.

Dogged performances, as they demonstrated under Walter Smith, Craig Brown and Alex McLeish, are what the Scots do best. There must be no debate, therefore, over the basic point that Scotland's new manager has to err on the side of caution. It is time for the return of a holding midfielder – Gary Caldwell, if only to get him away from the defence – and a single striker. The time of Kenny Miller, no goals in 11 Scotland outings, has passed; Steven Fletcher should be the man to fulfil that role.

An obdurate Scotland, in the absence of prodigious talent, is the only way forward. With that in mind, it is little wonder Craig Levein is touted as the favourite to replace Burley. Those who question his record at Dundee United should look beyond league finishes, to a club which has been raised from the level of perennial underachievers and where managers came and went with all-too-regular ease.

Anybody who has worked for or under Levein, with the odd inevitable exception of course, would point to his professionalism and work ethic. When a manager routinely asks his scouts how many times an opposition goalkeeper rolls the ball to either his left or right-back in a single match, his attention to detail is worthy of praise.

It is tricky to imagine this Andrew Driver affair rumbling on as it has done if Levein was the Scotland manager. It should be the job of Levein to step in where Burley was seemingly unwilling to find out whether Driver and others like him want to play for Scotland or continue with the pipe dream that an England call-up may come one day. For the good of the country, a persuasive touch is needed, plus the acceptance that a few knock-backs will be taken along the way.

Yet the name of the chosen individual, for now, can wait. It is time for the SFA genuinely to pull the country from this football malaise and not just pay it lip service. Gordon Smith, the chief executive, is a fine football man whose heart is unquestionably in the right place. His ideas, though, have and will too often be lost in the association's complex committee structure. Autonomy should be bestowed on the new national coach, meaning he can fully, as the job title also shows, operate as the technical director of the SFA.

That coach must also take a keen interest in the development of players and structure of teams throughout the Scotland system. It is baffling, for example, that the nation's Under-17 team operated with a single striker in recent home matches. The shortcomings of the full Scotland team is well known but should it not be the aim of coaches further down the chain to produce teams who look to win games rather than avoid defeat? The attacking presence of Scottish teams will never improve if it is not developed at youth level.

The very quality of such coaching, in any case, remains an intriguing topic. Certain people at the SFA would have onlookers believe that, because José Mourinho studied for coaching badges at their base in Largs, they produce a hotbed of managerial talent. Such a theory is as complacent as it is patently untrue; the basic lack of standards of too many Scottish football players today must be linked, at least in some part, to the coaching they receive.

A former politician, Henry McLeish, is heading up Scottish football's latest think tank with the first set of findings due to be published in January. Quite why this one should succeed when numerous others of its kind have been rendered almost meaningless in the past is open to debate. High on the list of McLeish's recommendations, nonetheless, should be the insistence that Scotland's next manager does far more than simply set out tactics for the international team once every few months.

Kennedy's retirement was the latest cruel blow; it will take the serious influence of a hands-on manager to prevent the football nation suffering much more.